Welcome back to our weekly series, Grow With Skilio!

In this series, we will be sharing relevant learning resources on soft skills and their associated behavioural competencies. Along the way, we will also include relevant learning resources and tips for you to hone them!

In this week’s #GrowWithSkilio edition, we will be exploring deep into the behavioural competency of Target Setter, which is a great contributor to the soft skill of Teamwork.

Before we dive into the topic, let me give you some questions to ponder about. Are you a person who sets goals? How often do you set goals? How often do you revisit your list of goals? Despite knowing the importance of setting goals and targets in our life, through various success stories such as Bruce Lee, the famous martial artist and movie star, we still tend to neglect the importance of goal setting as we move through in life.

Source: Bruce Lee aficionado, Jake Fillon

The importance of setting goals and targets is especially important in a team, where you need to bring a group of people with different mindsets together to work towards a common goal. This process is easier said than done, we can see this from how often teams in various contexts such as in competitions or companies experience failures. This is likely a result of them not setting clear goals as a team, in turn, resulting in the lack of teamwork.

Our article would be targeting the root cause of such teams’ failure as we will be delving into how goal setting plays a major role in cultivating a successful team.

What is Goal Setting?

Goal setting can be defined as the process of crafting action plans for you to achieve your goals. In this process, you first decide on what you want to accomplish, and from there, plan measurable targets you want to reach in a specific timeframe.

You embark on planning for your future with goal-setting. Goal setting is extremely crucial in developing skills in various facets of your life, including your work, relationships, physical health, and many more. Hence, when you understand the importance of goals and the strategies in setting effective goals, you can eventually pave your road to success.

Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.

— Pablo Picasso

Why do we need to set goals as a team?

Setting goals together as a team allows every team member to understand their role in achieving the ultimate objective of the team. Undoubtedly, with a clear understanding of the team’s overall goal and each team member’s responsibility, your team can optimise and attain improved efficiency.

In summary, setting team goals can eventually bring about these three main benefits:

1. Transparency

Setting team goals as a team ensures that all information is made known to everyone, and this helps keep everyone on the same page. In every team, each member will have their individual responsibilities. However, if you are aware of what the rest of the team is working on, in other words, the roles and responsibilities of other members, you will not feel like you are working hard towards the team’s objectives alone. Instead, you have comrades that are also working hard alongside you, towards the same goal.

2. Motivation

Make sure that your entire team clearly understands wider team objectives. This is such that your team members can then understand the meaning behind their actions and better appreciate the value of their efforts, beyond the seemingly mundane tasks they are assigned to. This is a great source of motivation and alignment that encourages your fellow teammates to accomplish more.

3. Collaboration

Have you ever heard any of your team members saying, “Anyone’s success in this team is everyone’s success”? Have you ever wondered why one would say this? This is because the accomplishment of each team member’s individual targets ultimately leads to achieving the overall team goal, resulting in the success of the team. If every team member can nurture this mindset, your team would be discouraged from competing with one another. Instead, everyone would help each other with problems, collaborating to attain the team’s desired results.

If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.

— Henry Ford

Characteristics of a Team with Goals

Want to check on whether your team managed to set efficient team goals? You can look out for these characteristics, which can be easily remembered with this simple acronym, CCARRTT (simplified as CART).

1. Cooperative — Your team members work together, help each other out to meet your targets, and can depend on one another.

2. Contented — Your team members are satisfied with the dynamics of your team and are happy being a part of the team.

3. Adapted to the team — Your team members are used to how your team functions as a whole.

4. Relaxed — Your team members fully understand what is the future directive of your team, so everyone is comfortable.

5. Right every time — Your team members know what is expected of themselves, so everyone completes their responsibilities precisely.

6. Trusting — Your team members recognise that all of their hard work will pay off.

7. Team morale — Your team has high morale, and all of you see the possibilities lying ahead for your team instead of just the difficulties.

How to Set Your Team Up For Success

Now that you know how setting targets as a team can greatly contribute to your team’s success, you would have to learn how to set effective team goals. But first, you have to understand that a team brings together a group of people from various backgrounds, with diverse experiences and skillsets. With this, it is very important to set goals or targets as a team to help the team to unite as one and solve challenges together.

What are team goals?

Team goals are the objectives or milestones that a team commits to working towards together, for the performance or benefit of the team.

6 Incredible Tips To Set Effective Team Goals

To help your team invest in the team goals, you must create effective team goals that can both maximise each member’s skillsets as well as squarely achieve your team’s objectives. You have to align the objectives of the team with that of each individual team member. These team-specific goals should make all of your work contribute to the same outcome.

Here are some strategies on setting effective team targets for you to set your team up for success!

1. Know what objectives your team wants to achieve.

Before you set your team targets with your team, you would need to think about what is the overall wider goal that you wish to accomplish with your teammates. Following, you need to let your team be aware of your team’s main objective. All of your members must have a common consensus on what everyone is working towards.

2. Set goals using the S.M.A.R.T framework.

Remember to use the S.M.A.R.T criteria to set any team targets or goals.

(S)pecific: The more specific your target, the more focused your efforts can be, the more likely you can reach your target. In our Skilio Marketing team, we have weekly targets for our social media reach, for instance, the goal of increasing engagement rate by 25% on Instagram in a month. The inclusion of the type of social media platform and the target percentage increase makes the goal more specific than the goal of just improved engagement rate. With precise targets set, you are better able to track your progress and craft more actionable plans.

(M)easurable: Your targets should be measurable for you to track your progress toward meeting your targets. You should also divide your measurable target into smaller, clearer and manageable milestones. This makes it easier for each individual team member or your team to monitor your team’s growth. Relating to our previous example, we can measure our weekly increments in engagement rate towards the goal of 25% improvement. In contrast, measuring progress towards an ambiguous goal can be far more challenging.

(A)chievable: Your targets should be realistic. You should possess the adequate capacity or ability to meet your target within an appropriate time period. With a more attainable goal, you would be more efficient in utilising your time and resources to achieve your goal.

(R)elevant: Your targets must be relevant to your situation. Teams are often motivated to tackle the many issues they are facing, but with limited resources, it is impossible to resolve all issues at once. Your team needs to filter out the most pressing issues and ensure that your team has the resources and skills to resolve them. Relevant team targets propel the team to achieve their overall team goal.

(T)imely: Your targets should have clear deadlines. Deadlines are imperative in setting goals and targets, for a more efficient and productive use of your team’s time and resources. Your team would develop accountability for their tasks and targets, making your team goals more meaningful. A goal without a deadline is meaningless as you can continuously procrastinate on its completion and it may never be accomplished. It is an unpleasant sight to see your team members not taking their goals seriously and becoming discouraged and disconnected from your team objectives.

Personally, I tend to procrastinate on many things, such as on exam revisions and on self-paced online courses. Fortunately, in Skilio, we have project-based deadlines, where schedules and deadlines all are displayed in a shared excel document, which is accessible to all team members. Our team leaders also give us clear deadlines for each task, and every team member including me would work towards those deadlines dutifully. From this, we all agree that we definitely cannot do without deadlines.

3. Allow team members to develop their own goals

With your team objectives and the S.M.A.R.T framework in mind, you can start by setting goals at the team level. These team goals can then be broken down into individual goals. Team members should all be allowed to develop their own individual goals. This way, each of you can take into consideration your own skills, experience and resources to create your own goals, which can support the wider team objectives. The greater the involvement of you and your teammates in setting targets for your team and yourselves, the more committed to those team goals all of you are likely to be.

Do write down the goals and targets you have identified. Research shows that writing down goals makes for an 80% higher chance of achieving them.

4. Help your team in meeting their individual goals

Each team member should have assigned responsibilities and individual milestones, despite sharing a common team goal.

If you are a team leader, you can help your team achieve their goals by:

Have regular 1-on-1 meetings with your teammates to check on how things are going (on team goals, progress, questions/concerns)

Show your team that you are open to questions/concerns and to giving guidance

Help your team members to develop individual milestones, for them to track their progress as well as the team’s progress

Provide advice on how each teammate can fulfil their responsibilities

Give your team regular feedback so they understand the progress, on which aspects are working well, and on which aspects that need improvement

5. Track progress, provide feedback & celebrate success

As mentioned in Tip #2, goals should be tangible and measurable so you can track your team’s progress towards success. Help your team stay focused by tracking their progress and provide them with effective and timely feedback, through various channels like weekly check-ins or our Skilio platform. Our Skilio platform includes features such as guided self-reflection and peer feedback, which allow your team members to reflect upon not only their own progress but also assess their team member’s progress. Your team leaders can also conveniently provide you with regular and specific feedback through this platform.

Seeing their progress clearly displayed on the platform through their self-reflection and peer feedback, your teammates would feel a strong sense of accomplishment as it indicates a step closer to success. This encourages your team to work even harder towards the goals.

Also, do take the time to acknowledge and reward the efforts of your team members as and when they deserve it by celebrating successes, and prepare for future goal setting. The rewards could be in the form of recognition in a meeting, a small gift or a team meal. You are setting your team up for greater success by celebrating small successes.

6. Learn from your mistakes

In reality, not all goals are going to be met. Some goals might be set too high on purpose, some may not be realistic, while some may have faced some unforeseen circumstances throughout the allocated time period.

Make sure that your team understands that it is absolutely normal and okay to fail. Your goal is not the be-all and end-all. Your goal simply serves as a map, guiding your team towards success and is not success itself. Nevertheless, embracing failure does not mean that you can accept mediocrity or that your goals are meaningless, it merely means that nobody can guarantee success.

The most important thing is to learn from our mistakes, and move on from them with valuable takeaways. Ask your team questions like: What aspects did we not perform well in? How can we do this differently and improve in future? What can we do to prevent such a mistake from happening again?

To conclude…

You probably already have some experience in working in a team, or you may currently be working in a team, if not, in the future you would definitely experience working in a team. Do you remember incorporating any of such goal setting strategies for your team in the past? Or are you now tempted to apply such strategies in your upcoming team projects? With all these great tips on hand, you are definitely capable enough to transform your team from goal setting to goal achieving!

Lastly, we would like to end this article with an old African proverb that says it all: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Nurture a team with effective teamwork through the setting of smarter team targets, and achieve success together.

As strong advocates for soft skills here at Skilio, we will be sharing more practical tips on soft skills in our next few articles. Each article will be tailored to develop one behavioral competency, in which we will also recommend action-ables you can complete to help you in your first steps to changing yourself. Remember to come back for more good resources and follow us on our social media platforms to stay updated with our content!

About us

Skilio is a soft skills measurement and analytics platform that empowers organizations to track soft skill development through experiences. For more information, do check us out here. Alternatively, drop us an email on [email protected] for more information.